How to prepare for Google Asia Pacific University (APAC) Test ?

Google Asia Pacific University Test, also referred to as Google APAC, is perhaps the best opportunity for a student enrolled in higher education institutes in the APAC region to mark a place in the big shot in the IT Sector – Google.

Registration details

1. Go to the Google APAC Website and click on participate.
2. Once you login from your Google account, you will be forwarded to the registration form for Google APAC 2017.
3. Fill all the details like name, country, gender, university details, etc. You will need to know your University ID. Contact your college for this.
4. Fill in the details about any internship or project experience that you have, any awards/honours that you have received carefully. Be precise and to – the point.
5. Provide your resume link. Preferably, your resume should be of only one page length with one or two lines about every project that you have worked upon, internship experience etc.
6. Once you have filled all the details, click on I accept. Register!

Once you have completed all the registration formalities, you can take the test on your preferred date. The schedule is given below:

Schedule for Google APAC -2017 Test

Note: 

• There is no restriction on the number of rounds you can sit in. Only the best score will be taken into account.
• Shortlisted students may be called for interviews for internships as well as full time roles after reviewing their form entries and performance in the APAC tests.

Selection Process

Each APAC round will have 4 problems of varying difficulty. There are two kinds of input that you can test your solution for, small and large. Solving a problem for small input will give you lesser points as compared to the large one but it will be easier to solve too. The solutions are graded according to Google’s terms and finally the leaderboard is prepared. The students are then sorted according to their position in the leaderboard and their registration form entries and may be called for interviews for internship or full time job. There are usually 4 interview rounds with questions ranging from subjects like Programming, Algorithms, Data Structures, and Operating System.

What to study??

To crack the Google APAC University test, one must have a good grasp on algorithms and data structures. Without working hard on data structures and algorithms , its not possible to crack the Google APAC test. These are some of the important topics that one should try before going for Google APAC Exam: 1. Start your preparation with the basic data structures. You should know how to implement them according to the problem given.

• Linked list
• Binary search tree
• Array
• Stack
• Queue
• You can also refer to this extensive list of articles on Data structures for more information.

2. Next comes a bit more advanced stuff.

• Graph algorithms
  • Breadth First Search (BFS)
  • Depth First Search (DFS)
  • Shortest Path from source to all vertices **Dijkstra**
  • Bridges in a graph
  • Articulation Points (or Cut Vertices) in a Graph
  • Johnson’s algorithm
  • Topological Sort
  • Minimum Spanning tree **Kruskal**
  • Minimum Spanning tree **Prim**
• Hashing
• Heaps
• Searching and sorting
  • Binary Search
  • Quick Sort
  • Merge Sort
  • Counting Sort
  • KMP algorithm
  • Rabin karp
  • Z’s algorithm
  • Aho Corasick String Matching
• Number theory concepts
  • Sieve of Eratosthenes
  • Segmented Sieve
  • Wilson’s Theorem
  • Prime Factorisation
  • Pollard’s rho algorithm

3. Once you are done with this, you can move on to more advanced algorithms like:

• Convex Hull
• Graham Scan
• Line Intersection
• Interval Tree
• Matrix Exponentiation
• Maxflow Ford FulkersonAlgo and Edmond Karp Implementation
• Min cut
• Stable Marriage Problem
• Hopcroft–Karp Algorithm for Maximum Matching

What to practice?

If you are a beginner, you can start your preparation from the basic and easy programming challenges and then can slowly move on to more difficult ones.

• neveropen practice section provides an excellent collection of programming challenges sorted according to category and difficulty level.
• Also, make sure that you try out previous APAC Tests.